The Vanity Fair Diaries

1983-1992

By: Tina Brown

Narrated by: Tina Brown

This program is read by the author.

Tina Brown kept delicious daily diaries throughout her eight spectacular years as editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. Today they provide an incendiary portrait of the flash and dash and power brokering of the Excessive Eighties in New York and Hollywood.

The Vanity Fair Diaries is the story of an Englishwoman barely out of her twenties who arrives in New York City with a dream. Summoned from London in hopes that she can save Condé Nast's troubled new flagship Vanity Fair, Tina Brown is immediately plunged into the maelstrom of the competitive New York media world and the backstabbing rivalries at the court of the planet's slickest, most glamour-focused magazine company. She survives the politics, the intrigue, and the attempts to derail her by a simple stratagem: succeeding. In the face of rampant skepticism, she triumphantly reinvents a failing magazine.

Here are the inside stories of Vanity Fair scoops and covers that sold millions—the Reagan kiss, the meltdown of Princess Diana's marriage to Prince Charles, the sensational Annie Leibovitz cover of a gloriously pregnant, naked Demi Moore. In this cinematic audiobook, the drama, the comedy, and the struggle of running an "it" magazine come to life. Brown's Vanity Fair Diaries is also a woman's journey, of making a home in a new country and of the deep bonds with her husband, their prematurely born son, and their daughter.

Astute, open-hearted, often riotously funny, Tina Brown's The Vanity Fair Diaries is a compulsively fascinating and intimate chronicle of a woman's life in a glittering era.

©2017 Tina Brown (P)2017 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

Best Audiobooks of 2017 -BookPage

"Here, in all their glory, are the excessive and extravagant go-go 1980s." -AudioFile

Speed Read

Ms. Brown is clearly a woman of many talents, but reading is not one of them. The book would benefit if she did not sound as if she were running from an oncoming train. A slower pace might have allowed for more expression as well. Her story, while interesting, sounds too detached to draw the reader in.

A long visit with a delightful, powerful friend

Tina Brown sounds like a favorite friend sharing her extraordinary personal, professional, creative, and family experiences over nearly a decade. She’s led a fantastic life through hard work, enormous talent, brains, inspiration, luck, charm, wit.

I loved being in NYC with her during this oh so interesting time while she is woman, wife, mommy, boss, friend, cultivator of talent, taste maker, strategist, fingers crossed leaper & more.

Engaging

Wonderful to travel along with Tina as she builds VF and refreshes the New Yorker

Ok story but frenetic pace

Narration is so frenetic had to slow it down. interesting perspective on a favorite magazine

loved it!

The diary style made it feel so real (dare I say "authentic?") and Tina's beautiful word pictures made her account of events feel almost like they've now become my memories. haha!